Four Great Examples of List Building

If an entrepreneur launches a new business, and no one hears about it, did it happen?

It hurts to put that much effort into nurturing an idea into an enterprise, then lack the budget or tools to show people what you do and how it benefits them. Maybe you don’t have the time for PR or a background in list building? You don’t need those things. You can buy an entire marketing department as a package you use one hour a day. You can get the services you need without hiring.

The value of your list grows with interest.

The sooner you start, the faster you’ll find the techniques that work for your audience. Marketing and PR are about relationship building. Professional relationships grow like 401Ks — put a little effort in each month — and watch your list get big. Not LinkedIn’s list. Not Facebook’s list. Your list of everyone your organization has brushed up against and their communication preferences. Your list is a significant part of the value of your enterprise. It pays to grow and groom your list.

Four Great Examples of List Building

Orobora started in 1994 with a “golden list” of 300 influencer email addresses. That list has grown to a database of more than 30,000 media contacts with dozens of facts about each one. Our list is especially strong online: discussion moderators, talk show hosts, blog tour venues, top reviewers, ezine editors, and top bloggers. Orobora can help you produce quality content, capture contact information and build your own “golden list.” Contact Steve O’Keefe, Content Director, Orobora, or call us at 540-324-7023. Here are four more examples of great list building campaigns produced by the team at Orobora.

1. The Digital Home of Dr. Seuss

When Dr. Seuss took his fanciful world online, his publisher contacted Steve O’Keefe, Content Director of Orobora, to handle the website launch. O’Keefe built the Read Across America Children’s Author Chat Series and secured the partnership of the National Education Association (NEA) in bringing the world’s greatest children’s authors into classrooms around the globe.

The series ran for years, and Random House walked away with contact information for thousands of teachers who registered to participate in the chats. Orobora is clever at crafting campaigns that leverage online technology to connect with your target audience.

2. The Age of Spiritual Machines

Ray Kurzweil is the lead engineer at Google. He is without doubt one of America’s greatest inventors and entrepreneurs. Ray is the guy who taught machines how to see (flatbed scanner), how to read (OCR), how to listen (voice recognition), how to speak (machine-generated language), and how to sing (the Kurzweil keyboard).

In each case, Ray developed the technology, sold the business and advanced to the next challenge. Today, he’s teaching computers how to think (artificial intelligence).

Ray is also the author of several books including The Age of Spiritual Machines. The team at Orobora produced the online marketing campaign for Ray’s book, pitching hundreds of media outlets, sending review copies and press kits, and following up. We’re not afraid of grunt work. It might be the only work left soon…

3. Believe It or Not!

When Ripley’s Believe It or Not! launched a new edition of their bestselling book tied to theme park installations and a global multimedia branding extravaganza, they asked the team at Orobora to create an online campaign that would appeal to teens. We convinced them it would be a bad idea to target teens, but we could create a campaign for middle-school science teachers.

That was the birth of Ripley’s Freaky Fridays, a live online science class piped into participating classrooms and taught by two award-winning science librarians. Hundreds of classrooms signed up. It was science the way it should be: gross, funny, memorable!

4. List Building for Dummies

The …For Dummies phenomenon is the story of entrepreneurs at IDC who created first books, then a brand, then sold the brand to Wiley, then Wiley did something that almost never happens: They made a great brand greater: Bigger. Smarter. Global.

The team at Orobora was part of that story. Hired first by IDC, then by Wiley, we did online PR for the brand for over a decade. We distributed excerpts from new releases and produced dozens of well-attended online events for books like:

Alternative Medicine for Dummies

Magic for Dummies with David Pogue

Pregnancy for Dummies

The happy result for IDC and Wiley — in addition to record sales — was a database of online forum hosts and moderators, partnerships with major online venues, thousands of opt-in subscribers, tons of web traffic, and tremendous brand penetration.

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Steve O'Keefe

Steve O'Keefe is the Content Director at Orobora where he designs content marketing campaigns for authors, experts, companies and brands. Steve is the author of The Complete Guide to Internet Publicity (WILEY) and taught Internet Public Relations at Tulane University for over a decade. In addition to his work with Orobora, Steve is Director of the Staunton Media Lab, a media arts program for the deaf, blind and uniquely able where he sources audio and video for campaigns.